Feeling for Tara

Until the other night, I had never heard of Tara Kirk. In fact, the next morning, I still didn't know her name. Rather she was just the US swimmer who missed the Olympic Swimmer by .01 (that's one one-hundreth of a second) in the 100 meter breaststroke. There are 246,149,280,000 hundreths of a second in the average lifetime. Because of one of those Kirk isn't going to the Olympics. Unless of course she can qualify in the 200-meter breaststroke, which Kirk has admitted isn't her strongest of events. The Trials can be so cruel, read Pat Forde's take on ESPN.com or take Kirk's word for it. She had the courage to write about it here.

Wow, that is some powerful stuff. We can't begin to understand the hurt she is feeling. But we can try to understand just how cruel these trials are.

Our hope in all of this is that Kirk finds the strength to rebound in the 200 - and then somehow ends up in the Games.